Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
In a typical cellular wireless communication system, an area is divided into cells and cell sectors, each defined by a radio frequency radiation pattern from a respective base station. Each base station is then typically connected with other network infrastructure.
A typical cellular wireless system includes a number of base stations that radiate to define wireless coverage areas, such as cells and cell sectors, in which wireless communication devices (WCDs), such as cell phones, tablet computers, tracking devices, embedded wireless modules, and other wirelessly equipped communication devices, can operate. In turn, each base station is typically coupled with equipment that provides connectivity with one or more transport networks, such as the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and/or the Internet for instance. With this arrangement, a WCD operating within a coverage area of any base station can engage in air interface communication with the base station and can thereby communicate via the base station with various remote network entities or with other WCDs served by the base station.
WCDs and base stations generally communicate with each other over a radio frequency (RF) air interface according to a defined air interface protocol, examples of which include CDMA (e.g., IS-95, IS-2000, 1×RTT, 1×EV-DO, etc.), LTE, WiMAX, iDEN, TDMA, AMPS, GSM, GPRS, UMTS, EDGE, WI-FI (e.g., 802.11), BLUETOOTH, and others now known or later developed. Such air interface communication typically occurs on a frequency known as a “carrier” (which may actually be a pair of frequencies, one for communications from the base station to the WCD, and another for communication from the WCD to the base station). The base-station-to-WCD link is known as the “forward link,” while the WCD-to-base-station link is known as the “reverse link.”
A wireless service provider typically operates numerous base stations in a given geographic region, to provide robust air interface coverage as WCDs move from one location to another. These cellular base stations are usually not associated with any subscriber or small group of subscribers in particular; rather, they are usually placed in publicly-accessible locations designed so that their coverage blankets cities, rural areas, etc. to be used by the service provider's customers generally. As such, these types of base stations are generally known as “macro base stations,” and the network that they collectively form, or to which they belong, is generally known as a “macro network.”
To address gaps in macro-network coverage (e.g. poor in-building coverage) and for other reasons, macro-network providers may offer their subscribers private base station devices known as “femtocells,” (also sometimes referred to as picocells, ubicells, microcells, or as femto-, pico-, ubi-, or micro-base stations or base transceiver stations), which are essentially small, low-power, low-capacity, and low-cost versions of a macro base station. As a general matter, a femtocell, which may be approximately the size of a desktop phone or WiFi access point, may communicate (through a wired or wireless link) with the user's broadband router and may establish a virtual private network (VPN) connection via the Internet with the wireless service provider's core network (e.g., with a femtocell controller on the wireless service provider's network). Further, the femtocell may include a wireless communication interface that is compatible with the user's WCDs and that is arranged to serve the WCD in much the same way that a macro base station does. With a femtocell positioned in a location where macro network coverage may be poor or unavailable, a user's WCD can thus be served by the femtocell in much the same way that the WCD would be served by a macro base station when within coverage of the macro network.